TRUMP’S TAX BILL:
TRUMP’S SECRET
AMNESTY, WIDER OPEN BORDERS DOCTRINE TO KEEP WAGES DEPRESSED.
"During the same month that
Schlafly had backed Trump for his “America First”
agenda, Nielsen’s committee
released an ideologically-globalist report, promoting
the European migrant crisis
as a win for big business who would profit greatly
from a never-ending stream
of cheap, foreign
migrants."
Graduate students protest
Republican tax bill
By
our reporters
1 December 2017
Thousands of graduate students and faculty members from over 40 US
universities protested Wednesday against the provision to tax graduate student
tuition waivers included in the Republican tax plan which passed the US Senate Committee earlier this week.
The protests, which were mostly called by various graduate student
unions, took place in New York City, Alabama, California, Minnesota and Kansas.
Two of the largest demonstrations occurred at UC Berkeley (300-400 graduate
students) and the University of Minnesota.
The American Council for Education has calculated that the combined effect of all the House bill’s provisions on higher education would
increase its cost by $65 billion over the next 10 years. Graduate students
would be the hardest hit.
According to an analysis by UC Berkeley, taxes for a campus
teaching assistant at this institution, which charges some $13,793 of tuition
per year, would rise by 61 percent or $1,400 per year, and by 31 percent for a
research assistant.
Emma Carroll, a Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley’s molecular and cell
biology department, told Berkeleyside.com that
her stipend was “just enough to cover basic expenses.” The extra taxes could
force many of her fellow students to drop out and younger ones to avoid
graduate education altogether. She said: “In our field, you have to go to
graduate school. It’s akin to an attack on biomedical research as a whole,
which is not a partisan issue. Everyone gets cancer.”
The increase would be even higher at private institutions such as
New York University, the University of Southern California or MIT, which charge
around $50,000 in annual tuition. At MIT, for instance, which has an annual
tuition rate of $49,600, taxes for graduate students would more than triple to
$13,577, according to a report by Berkeleyside.com.
Most graduate students have an annual stipend of less than $30,000. Most of the
American graduate students have to pay off massive amounts of student debt from
their undergraduate studies.
Especially in California and New York, where rents and the total
cost of living are extremely high, graduate student life would become
impossible if this tax provision was to be implemented. Graduate student
education would become accessible only to the super-rich and virtually all
branches of the natural sciences and humanities would be starved of new
researchers.
Reporters for the World
Socialist Web Site spoke to protesters at the graduate student
walkout in New York City’s Union Square which drew some 100 students from
Columbia University, New York University, the City University of New York and
the New School University. Banners said, “Kill the bill” and “Tax the rich.”
Chants included, “Tax the rich, not the poor, you won’t have TA’s [Teaching
Assistants] no more.”
Taylor, a graduate student of history at NYU, said: “I came here
to protest the GOP bill because I just want to be able to exist in this world,
in academia. Especially living in New York City, I don’t think I would be able
to go to grad school anymore if this bill gets through. I also need to pay off
student loans. I think education should just be kept accessible for people from
all economic backgrounds. It is true that it is hardly accessible for everyone
now, but this bill would make it even worse.”
Irinia, a Ph.D. student in psychology at CUNY, told the WSWS: “I'm
an international student, I’m from Argentina and am studying here on a research
fellowship. I think that if this bill passes, international students won’t be
coming to the US anymore and at this point, they often constitute about 50
percent of the classes [at the graduate level]. In general, what is going on
politically now in the US is pretty scary.”
Austin, who is a graduate student in the physics department of
NYU, said: “It is clear that this bill is for the wealthy and the donors who
finance those who are proposing this legislation. It will be difficult to
remove all the money from the political system, I think it’s kind of hopeless.”
Kim Adams is in the graduate program for a Ph.D. in English at New
York University and a member of Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC).
She explained to the WSWS, “Under the tax bill, my tax bill would go up because
the tuition charge that NYU waives would be claimed to be income, even though I
never see this income. If I were still in course work, my taxable income would
double because, with the college charging $8,000 for a class, I would have a
larger tuition waiver. I am almost done with my program but the tax charge
would mean I need to take on the burden of teaching an extra course to make up
the difference. However, for someone just starting out, a newly promising
student may just go to another career when faced with this larger cost.”
Pauline, a passerby who decided to join the protest, told a
reporter: “I believe that all student debt and medical debt should be canceled.
These debts are negatively impacting on our mental health. The corporate media
say that we are divided, but there is a growing opposition to austerity. The
2008 bailout of the banks was widely unpopular. There is an increasing
opposition to economic inequality.”
The rally was politically dominated by the universities’ graduate
unions, especially the GSOC and the pseudo-left organizations such as the
International Socialist Organization (ISO) and the Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA). Encouraging the chant of pro-union songs (“Get up, get down, New
York is a union town”), they all avoided discussing both the political
significance of the tax bill at large and the role of the Democratic Party in
the bipartisan assault on higher education.
Their perspective amounts to pressuring the Democratic Party to
make limited and temporary concessions to the interests of academics and
graduate students. The Senate tax bill does not include the provision to tax
graduate tuition waivers as income. It will likely be put to a full vote this
week and if it passes, both tax plans would have to be reconciled. The main aim
of the graduate student unions at this point is to pressure Democratic senators
and congressmen to vote for a version of the tax bill which, while still
providing for a massive transfer of wealth from the working and middle classes
to the oligarchy, would not directly attack graduate students.
A genuine and successful struggle in defense of higher education
requires a break with precisely this perspective and a turn of students toward
the working class.
"Finally, by putting a $1.5 trillion hole in the budget, the tax
plan will accelerate demands for slashing Medicare, Medicaid
and Social Security, together with other forms of social
spending, to plug the gap."
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
The US tax bill: A massive handout to the financial elite
18 November 2017
On Thursday, the US House of Representatives passed a sweeping bill that will slash taxes on the wealthy and hike taxes on millions of working class households, in a move that will further fuel social inequality in the world’s most unequal developed country.
Since the 1960s, the slashing of top income and corporate tax rates has been a major driving force in the phenomenal growth of social inequality in the United States. Now, under the fascistic billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump, this process is being kicked into overdrive.
The centerpiece of the bill is the reduction of corporate tax rates by almost half, from 35 to 20 percent, at an estimated public cost of $1.5 trillion, making US corporate taxes the lowest since 1939. This will dramatically accelerate the fall in effective corporate taxes that has taken place since the 1950s, when the effective tax rate was 50 percent, to today, when it is less than 20 percent.
Next, the financial elite is salivating over the abolition of the estate tax, which the bill mandates by 2025, providing a massive windfall to the top 0.2 percent of households.
According to a report published last month by UBS, more than half of all billionaire wealth in the US is controlled by individuals older than 70, and the US financial elite has been waiting for the abolition of the estate tax to transfer its wealth to the next generation. The abolition of the estate tax would be a major step toward making the United States a hereditary oligarchy, in which wealth is passed down dynastically without any diminution.
According to the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation, under the Senate version of the bill, by 2027 every family earning below $75,000 per year will see a tax hike, and every family making above $100,000 per year will see a tax cut.
The bill includes provisions that are little more than cruel and insulting. Alongside a tax break for the ownership and maintenance of private jets, it mandates the elimination of tax deductions for graduate student stipends and tuition reimbursement. The Harvard Crimson wrote that the result would be a 400 percent tax increase on graduate students, who are often massively underpaid.
Finally, by putting a $1.5 trillion hole in the budget, the tax plan will accelerate demands for slashing Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, together with other forms of social spending, to plug the gap.
While Democratic politicians mouthed criticisms of the Republican-sponsored bill, its most important measure, the corporate tax cut, has been a major element in the Democratic playbook. The Obama administration’s 2016 budget, for example, called for lowering the corporate tax rate to between 28 and 25 percent.
The New York Times, a leading mouthpiece for the Democratic Party, wrote in an editorial this week, “The Right Way to Cut Corporate Taxes,” that “Republicans are right about the corporate tax system being broken.” The newspaper added, “If Republicans worked with Democrats… they could reach a compromise to lower the top corporate tax rate to between 25 percent and 28 percent.”
On Thursday, the Times and leading Democratic politicians were far more concerned with whipping up a series of sex scandals, centered around Republican Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore and Democratic Senator Al Franken.
As expected, all three US stock indexes soared on Thursday following passage of the bill by the House of Representatives. Since the election of Donald Trump, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has shot up by 17 percent, and it has more than tripled in value since the 2008 financial crash.
In an interview last month, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made clear that a major driving force in the run-up in prices has been the expectation that the Trump administration is going to slash taxes on corporations and the super-rich.
“There is no question that the rally in the stock market has baked into it reasonably high expectations of us getting tax cuts and tax reform done,” said Mnuchin. “To the extent that we get the tax deal done, the stock market will go up higher.” He also made clear that Wall Street would not accept any slowdown in the upward redistribution of wealth. “There’s no question in my mind that if we don’t get it done, you’re going to see a reversal of a significant amount of the gains,” he said.
The comments by Mnuchin, the former Goldman Sachs banker worth nearly half a billion dollars, are just one expression of the stranglehold of the financial elite over political, social and economic life in the United States. The first and last priority of American society is the continuous enrichment of this financial oligarchy.
The United States is the most socially unequal developed country in the world. Just three men— Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos—have between them more wealth than the bottom half of the American population. The world’s billionaires have had their wealth shoot up by $1 trillion over the past year, driven by central bank money creation, tax cuts and incentives, and the continuous assault on the social position of the working class.
The domination of the financial elite, in the United States and around the world, over human civilization is the root cause of every serious problem of modern society, from poverty, homelessness, and drug addiction, to war. The ending of these evils requires the radical transformation and reorganization of society in the interest of social needs, not private profit.
Andre Damon
Democrats posture as opponents of Wall Street in CFPB dispute
By Patrick Martin
THE ENDLESSLY HISPANDERING DEMOCRAT PARTY funded by Wall Street’s biggest criminals says it is “ALL NEW”….
Meaning open borders to keep wages depressed and no regulation of plundering banks!
It’s Obama’s wet dream!
Meaning open borders to keep wages depressed and no regulation of plundering banks!
"The Dodd-Frank bill, which created it, was an effort by the Obama administration and the Democrats, who then controlled Congress, to pretend to crack down on Wall Street while actually doing very little."
Democrats posture as opponents of Wall Street in CFPB dispute
By Patrick Martin
28 November 2017
In what can only be described as a stage-managed publicity stunt, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Board, Democrat Richard Cordray, resigned abruptly on Friday after promoting his chief of staff, Leandra English, to the long-vacant position of deputy director.
English then declared herself to be Cordray’s successor and acting director, under the provisions of the Dodd-Frank bill, which established the CFPB in 2010 to act as an extremely limited, essentially toothless consumer watchdog on the depredations of US financial institutions.
The Trump White House, momentarily confused by the maneuver since Cordray had been expected to resign a week later, hastily named Budget Director Mick Mulvaney the acting director of the CFPB, and instructed English to report to Mulvaney as his deputy.
On Sunday night, English filed a civil lawsuit with the US District Court for Washington DC, seeking a declaratory judgment that she was the rightful CFPB director. However, the CFPB’s own general counsel, Mary McLeod, issued a memorandum to the agency’s employees instructing them that Mulvaney, as the nominee of the president, had the legal authority to direct the agency.
On Monday, Mulvaney visited the CFPB and took possession of the director’s office, announcing that he was halting all new hiring and regulatory actions for 30 days, pending a review of the agency’s operations.
While the 1,600 employees of the agency are concerned about an imminent threat to their jobs and livelihood—Mulvaney is an open enemy who, while in Congress, described the CFPB as a “sick joke” and advocated its abolition—the actions of Cordray, English and their Democratic congressional supporters are purely a political stunt.
There is little doubt that Trump has the authority, as president and head of the executive branch, to name interim replacements for vacancies at any executive agency. This authority is further codified in legislation enacted as recently as 1998.
The CFPB has been the subject of political posturing by both Republicans and Democrats since it was established six years ago in the wake of the 2008 Wall Street Crash. The Dodd-Frank bill, which created it, was an effort by the Obama administration and the Democrats, who then controlled Congress, to pretend to crack down on Wall Street while actually doing very little.
The Republicans, for their part, treated the CFPB as the second coming of the Bolsheviks, claiming that the tiny agency, with little enforcement power, was a threat to US financial markets and to the capitalist system itself.
Each capitalist party has used the agency for its own political purposes, while the CFPB itself has been nothing more than a minor annoyance to Wall Street. In six years of operation, it has been responsible for fines and restitution to consumers totaling $12 billion, or $2 billion a year. This amounts to barely one percent of the net profits of the US financial industry ($173 billion in 2016), and less than one half of one percent of bank revenues alone (over $400 billion and rising every year since the 2008 crash).
Cordray’s own role personifies the uses of the CFPB as a political cover. He was named to head the agency after Obama caved in to Republican opposition to Elizabeth Warren, his initial choice. Warren parlayed her undeserved reputation as a scourge of the bankers, and victim of the Republicans, into a successful campaign for a US Senate seat from Massachusetts.
Cordray’s fixed five-year term runs until July 1, 2018, so he was practically the sole Obama appointee to continue serving in the Trump administration. But he decided to abandon the post eight months early—and thus cede control of the CFPB to Trump—in order to seek the Democratic nomination for governor of Ohio. He then engineered the handover of authority to English, setting off the subsequent media firestorm, to jet-propel his own political campaign.
BLOG: YOU TAKE GOLDMAN SACHS OUT OF THE SWAMP KEEPER'S ADMIN AND THERE WILL BE NO AT HOME!
More broadly, the obvious determination of the Trump administration to stamp out even a fig leaf of accountability for the big banks allows the Democratic Party as a whole to adopt the stance of opposition to Wall Street.
NEXT TO OBAMA, CLINTON, FEINSTEIN
AND TRUMPER, CHUCK SCHUMER IS THE
BIGGEST BANKSTER SLUT IN THE SENATE
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer met with Leandra English and Elizabeth Warren Monday afternoon, and then denounced Trump for “putting the fox in charge of the henhouse.” So says the paid agent of the foxes, who has received more campaign contributions from Wall Street than anyone else in Congress.
Schumer’s deputy, Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, hailed the CFPB, declaring, “Wall Street hates it like the devil hates holy water”—perhaps uttering an inadvertent truth, since the CFPB is precisely as useless as holy water in fighting the domination of Wall Street over the US economy.
DESTABILIZE AMERICA TO LAY GROUNDS FOR A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/seth-barron-obama-and-building-of.html
US Senate committee passes tax windfall for the rich
By Barry Grey
TRUMP DEMANDS PUERTO RICO PAY THE BANKSTERS FIRST!
HOW MUCH DID SWAMP KEEPER TRUMPS HUNDREDS OF BANKRUPTCIES COST HIS BANKSTERS???
CHICAGO’S BLACK GANG LAND…. Is what happens when bankster Rahm Emanuel and his corrupt Obama party turned the city under!
BARACK OBAMA:
THE PSYCHOPATH WHO WOULD BE DICTATOR FUNDED BY HIS CRIMINAL CRONY BANKSTERS AND REELECTED FOR A THIRD TERM BY MEXICO
MICHAEL BARONE:
The Lawlessness of the Obama Administration: A never-ending story
CHICAGO: THE FACE OF A NATION IN SHAMBLES
CHICAGO’S BLACK GANG LAND…. Is what happens when bankster Rahm Emanuel and his corrupt Obama party turned the city under!
FROM THE FIRST DAY OF HIS FIRST TERM, BARACK OBAMA AND ERIC HOLDER HAD COMMENCED BUILDING A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP FUNDED BY CRONY BANKSTERS AND MEXICO.
OPERATION OBOMB:
DESTABILIZE AMERICA TO LAY GROUNDS FOR A MUSLIM-STYLE DICTATORSHIP
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2017/08/seth-barron-obama-and-building-of.html
“Obama’s new home in Washington has been described as the “nerve center” of the anti-Trump opposition. Former attorney general Eric Holder has said that Obama is “ready to roll” and has aligned himself with the “resistance.” Former high-level Obama campaign staffers now work with a variety of groups organizing direct action against Trump’s initiatives. “Resistance School,” for example, features lectures by former campaign executive Sara El-Amine, author of the Obama Organizing .”
ON SUICIDE WATCH:
HILLARY CLINTON: HER PARTNERSHIP WITH PUTIN TO DESTROY THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND RIG AN ELECTION
“If the Constitution did not forbid cruel and unusual punishment, the sentence I
would like to see imposed would place both Bill and Hillary Clinton in the same 8-
by-12 cell.” ROBERT ARVAY – AMERICANTHINKERcom
THE DIRTY DEALS of DIRTY HILLARY….. looting anything that moves!
Harvey Weinstein has been exposed in the media as the sexual predator he is, and Hillary Clinton has been exposed as the craven money-grubber she is; money over morality is the mantra she lives by. PATRICIA Mc CARTHY – AMERICAN THINKERcom
"But what the Clintons do is criminal because they do it wholly at the expense of the American people. And they feel thoroughly entitled to do it: gain power, use it to enrich themselves and their friends. They are amoral, immoral, and venal. Hillary has no core beliefs beyond power and money. That should be clear to every person on the planet by now." ---- Patricia McCarthy - AMERICANTHINKER.com
US Senate committee passes tax windfall for the rich
By Barry Grey
29 November 2017
The Senate version of the Republican bill to slash taxes for corporations and the rich won approval on a 12-to-11 party-line vote of the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday, setting the stage for its likely passage by the full Senate later this week. The House of Representatives passed a similar measure, also on a party-line vote, earlier this month.
Congress, backed by the Trump White House,
is hurtling toward the implementation of the
most brazen and far-reaching corporate raid
on the federal Treasury in US history. The
measure being rushed through Congress, without
public hearings and by means of legislative short
cuts, gimmicks and behind-the-scenes horse-trading
between political frontmen for various financial
interests, will dramatically cut taxes for big business
and the wealthy while increasing taxes on the
working class.
It will reduce federal tax revenues by between $1.4 trillion and $1.5 trillion over the next decade, sharply raising the federal deficit. Republican leaders such as House Speaker Paul Ryan and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady have already indicated that the increased deficit will be used as justification for laying siege to what remains of the basic social programs dating from the 1930s and 1960s: Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.
Both the House and Senate bills reduce the corporate tax rate from the current 35 percent to 20 percent, saving corporations trillions of dollars. They also dramatically slash taxes for other business owners and wealthy families, consolidate an aristocratic caste at the very top by cutting or eliminating the estate tax on hereditary wealth, and, in general, plunder the national economy in order to further enrich the ruling class.
The tax “reform” will make the United States,
already the most unequal developed economy
in the world, far more unequal.
Wall Street celebrated the forward progress of the Senate bill by driving all three major stock indexes to new record highs. The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up by 255 points, gaining more than 1 percent and closing in on the 24,000 mark. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index gained 0.98 percent and the Nasdaq picked up 0.49 percent.
The Budget Committee vote followed a luncheon meeting on Capitol Hill between President Trump and Senate Republicans, which Trump in a later White House appearance described as a “love fest.” Virtually all of the half-dozen Senate Republicans who have withheld support for the Senate bill emerged from the meeting signaling their readiness to back it when it comes up for a floor vote.
Two of these senators, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Bob Corker of Tennessee, are members of the Budget Committee and had threatened to vote against the measure, blocking it from coming up for a vote by the full Senate. Johnson has been holding out for a tax reduction for owners of so-called “pass through” businesses even greater than the 17.4 percent included in the current version of the Senate bill. A recent University of Chicago Study concluded that 69 percent of income from such businesses—where the owners pay the individual income tax rate rather than the corporate rate—goes to the top 1 percent of US earners.
Corker has demanded the addition of a trigger mechanism that would require taxes to be raised if federal revenues after a certain period fall short of congressional projections. Both said Tuesday they were confident their concerns would be addressed before a final bill is worked out between the House and Senate and signed by Trump, who has pledged to do so by Christmas.
Susan Collins of Maine, who has criticized the addition in the Senate bill of a repeal of the Obamacare individual mandate, which requires people not insured by their employer or the government to purchase insurance on the private market, said, “I believe that a lot of my concerns, it appears, are going to be addressed and that I’m going to be getting the opportunity to offer amendments on the senate floor.”
She added that Trump had pledged to support legislation restoring Obamacare subsidies to private insurers, which he had removed by executive order, if the individual mandate was repealed. The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that repeal of the individual mandate will result in four million fewer people having health insurance next year and 13 million fewer by 2027, along with a 10 percent yearly rise in premiums for those who continue to buy insurance on government-managed exchanges.
The Republicans control the Senate by a narrow 52 to 48 margin, meaning they can afford only two “no” votes from their caucus, since the Democrats are expected to vote as a bloc against the measure. A 50-50 tie would result in a Trump-Republican victory, since Vice President Mike Pence would cast the tie-breaking vote.
To avoid a Democratic filibuster and the need to marshal 60 votes, the Republicans are making use of the parliamentary maneuver of moving the bill under the “budget reconciliation” process. This requires, however, that the resulting deficit be kept below $1.5 trillion and not grow further after ten years.
To achieve this while ensuring a $6.7 trillion
increase in corporate revenues by 2037 and
hundreds of billions in tax breaks for the
richest 5 percent, they raise taxes elsewhere,
resorting to cruel tax measures that punish
working families and end up raising their
taxes.
The Senate bill makes cuts in individual income tax rates temporary, reverting back to the current rates after five years, while corporate tax cuts are permanent. It eliminates deductions on state and local taxes and terminates tax breaks on medical expenses, student loan interest, tuition deferments and a host of other expenses that disproportionately impact low- and middle-income households.
As a result, according to the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation, on average, households making less than $30,000 will start seeing negative effects in 2019 and households making less than $75,000 will become worse off in 2027. By that time, 50 percent of Americans will see their taxes rise.
Meanwhile, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, half of the tax cuts will go to the top 1 percent of households, those making more than $700,000 a year. The top 0.1 percent will receive up to 30 percent of total tax cuts.
The Democrats are putting on a show of opposition to this naked piece of class legislation, but on an entirely cynical and token basis. The Obama administration called for a cut in corporate taxes to between 25 percent and 28 percent, a massive transfer of wealth to the corporate elite that the Democratic Party continues to support.
As part of their political theatrics, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi boycotted a scheduled White House meeting with Trump and Republican congressional leaders on Tuesday to discuss extending the federal budget. The current extension expires on December 8, and without a further one, the federal government will be forced to partially shut down.
The Democratic leaders announced they would not attend after Trump issued a tweet Tuesday morning denouncing the Democrats for raising taxes, starving the military and supporting “illegal” immigration. He added that he did not believe a deal could be reached to avert a government shutdown.
Schumer was more forthright on the Democrats’ position on the tax bill when he spoke on the floor of the Senate later in the day, pleading once again for negotiations with the Republicans to work out a reactionary bipartisan compromise.
“It’s an issue crying out for a bipartisan solution,” Schumer declared. “There are a lot of areas where we agree. We have to work to find a middle ground that’s acceptable to both parties.”
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